Small Council: Rank the five seasons of Game of Thrones

The Small Council’s mission this week is simple: rank the five available seasons of Game of Thrones in order from best to worst. What’s makes a season good or bad? You decide. Justify your answer!

RAZOR: Sure, I’ll go first…what could go wrong, right? This is such an endlessly debated topic that I think no matter how many great points we may bring up, there will never be a clear winner. However, I’ll give it a shot:

When ranking the five Game of Thrones seasons, I personally look at the strongest episodes in each year. Most seasons have an amazing Episode 8 or 9 (sometimes both), but we have to look at the entirety  in order to come to a truely unbiased list.

Oh, who am I kidding? Season 5 had the Sand Snakes—it sucked the worst.

Razor’s List — Best to Worst

1. Season 1 will always be tops in my opinion, because of the introduction to everything. Also, Ned’s beheading provided the very first “WTF” moment for fans not expecting it, and Dany’s dragons being born in the finale was transcendent.
2. Season 4 was pretty amazing. Episode 2, “The Lion and the Rose” saw Joffrey die and we all cheered. Episode 4, “Oathkeeper” introduced us to the Night’s King. Episode 7, “Mockingbird” saw Lysa Arryn get pushed through the Moon Door, and we all cheered. Episode 8, “The Mountain and the Viper,” had the best fight scene in the series to date. Episode 9, “The Watchers on the Wall” is arguably one of the top 3 best episodes in the series. And finally, Episode 10, “The Children” saw Bran meet the Three-Eyed Raven and the death of Jojen…and we all cried.
3. Season 3 = the Red Wedding. No, shutup…just go with it.
4. Season 2 had The Battle of the Blackwater and Tyrion being a baller in King’s Landing as Hand of the King. I think this was my favorite Tyrion season.
5. Season 5…because, Bad Poosey. I don’t care that “Hardhome” was possibly the greatest episode in the history of the series. The Sand Snakes took a hot steaming dump on this season, and despite how many awards the popular media gave it, I will never forgive them their clunky dialogue, horrible plot holes, and terribly delivered monologues with their constant reminders that they were related to Oberyn Martell, who was their father, and also their dad.

ANI: I’ve been thinking about this now for about a day since Dan told us the topic of the week. and I have to admit….I’m torn.

On the one hand, I can list off my favorite seasons…from Seasons 1-4. And my reasons are close to Razor’s, but my reactions resulted in a different order:

1. Season 4: The roller coaster ride from Joffrey demise to Arya’s last ride.
2. Season 3: The build up to the roller coaster, with two weddings to Remember.
3. Season 1: The season that started it all.
4. Season 2: The quietest, most traditional season, and the one you’re most likely to forget held the line “There are brave men on the other side of that wall. LET’S GO KILL THEM.”

Season 5….we’re just too close to it still. I can’t rank it against the others, my emotional reactions are just too raw. I need time and distance to decide.

But then there’s this other thought I cannot shake: is Season 4 really the best season of Game of Thrones. Is it? Is it really? Or is the best season always the one you anticipate, the one you haven’t seen yet?

DAN: I don’t think Season 4 is the best season of Game of Thrones. Real good, but not the best. In a way, it’s one of the more superficial seasons of the show. It seems to reach for flash in a bunch of key moments, from Brienne fighting the Hound to the Mountain gouging out Oberyn’s eyes, which is probably the banner moment of the year. I don’t think the texture of it is quite as rich as in some of the earlier years.

But whatever it looses in texture it makes up for in fleet-footedness, so it’s still near the top of my list:

1. I agree with David—Season 1 is still the strongest year of the show. And I don’t think it’s just because everything was new. In Season 1, the story fit very comfortably within the parameters of a ten-episode TV show. There were enough characters and locations to make it feel epic, but not so many that it felt sprawling. And there was a strong thematic through line involving Ned Stark’s ultimately fruitless attempt to do the right thing. For better or worse, the show never felt quite as cohesive after Ned died.
2. Season 3—Outside of Season 1, this is the year that hung together best thematically, as portentous scene after portentous scene led up to the Red Wedding, which is probably the high point of the series. There was a richness to the proceedings I enjoyed, from Jaime and Brienne’s burgeoning friendship to Sansa’s dawning realization that she’d never be let off the hook and even to Jon’s attempts to fit in with the wildlings. And if action is what you’re looking for, you still have Daenerys sacking Astapor. Awesome.
3. Season 4—See the above comments about fleet-footedness. Joffrey’s death kicked things off with a bang, and the final four or so episodes may be the most breathless in the show’s run, from Lysa’s freefall to Tyrion’s trial (normal and by combat) to Stannis’ arrival at the Wall to Tywin’s death. It’s cliche for critics to describe TV shows as movies as “thrill rides,” but…well, that was pretty thrilling.
4. Season 5—I’ve written before about how Season 5 was rough around the edges, but by this point the show had become very adept at mounting dramatic spectacles, and we got some draw-droppers. The Massacre at Hardhome is an obvious contender, but I don’t think I’ve ever been more horrified by the show than when I watched Shireen burn, and I mean that as a complement. Cersei’s walk was also one for the history books. I wish the showrunners had treated the fine details with as much care as the big moments, but those big moments were worth the price of admission.
5. Season 2—I think the show experienced some growing pains as it reoriented itself following Ned’s death. It had to go from being a show with one main thread and a bunch of side stories to a show with a collection of equally important threads (even if a few of these threads would have benefitted from less attention, *cough* Daenerys in Qarth *cough*). This resulted in episodes that checked in on as many as eight story strands, even though spending time with each meant that none of them could really progress. The writing and acting was as solid as it’s ever been, and the Battle of the Blackwater is a series highlight, but sometimes it felt like nothing happened in a given episode.

Which isn’t to say Season 2 is bad TV. I wouldn’t call any of these seasons poor, despite David’s colorful language about the Sand Snakes. And Ani, are you suggesting that Tyrion’s line from “Blackwater” is bad? That line’s great!

CAMERON: I’ll be brief, because ranking is not actually an area of expertise for me (it’s not something I enjoy doing).

TOP NOTCH: Season 1 & 3 benefit from strong structure in the writing and all-around great performances. It’s difficult to say which one I like more; S3 definitely has more “wow” moments, but I like the slow stacking of pieces that S1 does as much as the sweeping effect of “dracarys” or the Red Wedding. Either way, these are the two best seasons in my opinion, no qualifiers necessary.

IT’S AIGHT: Season 4. There’s good and bad here. This is the season where the strain of adapting the books into 10-episode television seasons starts to show; while I still like it better than 5 & 2, the underlying writing problems that plague those two seasons also rear their ugly heads here. Thankfully there’s some charismatic actors to carry the material, and at least this one and Season 2 have structure in place.

NOT SO GOOD: I think I like Season 5 just a little more than Season 2, but these were the bad years of the show. While I understand the need to give Daenerys a more immediate motivation to enter the House of the Undying, I don’t think we needed multiple episodes of “WHERE ARE MY DRAGONS??” On the other hand, how bad were the Sand Snakes? In fact, I think there were only two plotlines in S5 that I actually enjoyed watching all the way through—Cersei’s and Jon’s. Everything else just felt like a funhouse mirror version of what happened in the books (or hasn’t happened yet, or cannot possibly have happened, or whatever). Season 2 in general often feels listless; I think some of it works, but I’m forever biased against it because I know there were better ways to execute that Daenerys storyline and I’m bitter about it.

So in list form:

1. Seasons 1 & 3
2. Season 4
3. Seasons 2 & 5

[polldaddy poll=9281862]